Archive for the ‘Jim Davis’ tag

So in the November HCC Lost and Found, I presented a photo submitted by a reader of a 1966 (or thereabouts) Shelby G.T.350 station wagon, along with a claim that Ford actually built two Mustang station wagons around that time. Yeah, I wasn’t too sure of that claim, but it’s a neat concept, and I thought I’d throw it out there just to see what kind of responses – either backing up or disproving that claim – I’d get.

First one came from Jeff Pearce of Harrisville, Utah, along with the photo above. It seems Jeff, who has been involved in Mustangs for more than 30 years, built the above Mustang station wagon in 1978 and still has it tucked away in one of his garages. Jeff wrote:

Other than some photos of a prototype design evaluation from “Automotive Quarterly” book “MUSTANG The Complete History of America’s Pioneer Ponycar” by Gary Witzenburg page 100 dated November 17, 1966, Ford NEVER built any Mustang wagons, so Shelby couldn’t either.

Next I heard from frequent Lost and Found correspondent Jim Davis, who ran across another Mustang wagon at a show in Minnesota this past summer.

I was looking at this car, assuming it was something some one had built and was trying to fiqure out what they used for the rear door when someone told me that it was a factory prototype. I had never heard of a Mustang Wagon before.

Yeah. So if Ford made just two of these, then we spied ‘em both in real quick order.

I think a lot of the rumors of factory prototype station wagons go back to late 1966, when Intermeccanica built the above Mustang station wagon for advertiser Barney Clark and designer Bob Cumberford and said wagon got exposure in the buff books of the day, including Car Life and on the October 1966 cover of Car and Driver. According to Intermeccanica’s website, the company actually built the wagon in 1965:

A Mustang Station Wagon prototype was built for the W. J. Thompson advertising agency. The car was presented as an idea car to Ford Motor Company.

Jeff Pearce said the Intermeccanica car still exists, though it’s “rusting away somewhere back East.”

So, case closed? Like I always say when a car’s provenance is in question: Show me the absolute proof.

UPDATE (7.October 2008): Couple things. First, Fred Beck of San Antonio, Texas, alerted me to the October 1991 issue of Car Collector magazine, in which Dennis Adler tracked down the story behind the Shelby wagon that got us started on this whole topic. As suspected, that was built by Bob Hoshiko, a Mustang and Shelby restorer from California who got the idea of building it after coming across the above-mentioned issue of Car and Driver.

The article also delves into the history of the Intermeccanica car and mentions that Ford at the time already had two internal Mustang wagon design proposals on the table, but according to Cumberford, Ford styling chief Eugene Bordinat “was incensed over the idea of an outside proposal, and Ford ultimately rejected all three designs, putting the lid on the Mustang wagon.” Cumberford then tried to get Holman and Moody to build the wagon, but they turned him down as well.

Some of the details of that story are at Wolfgang Kohrn’s Ponysite, which a commenter alerted us to earlier this year when we discussed the Mustero for sale in Pennsylvania. Interestingly, that idea actually saw more of the light of day thanks to the efforts of Southern California coachbuilders.